All what's needed is the patient making their own, home-made goat kefir (if they're not terribly allergic to dairy -- although even dairy allergies are a para-symptom of wheat allergy in reality). Kefir's 43 different bacteria and yeasts can kill CDiff, and it's being shown to do so in research (Minnesota university professor/doctor tried it recently too). But the kefir must be home-made (bottled ones don't include the full spectrum of bacteria/yeasts because of bottling regulations regarding alcohol the yeasts create), it must be from goat, sheep or buffalo milk (for less casein irritation, as the A2 casein is more compatible with humans), and it must be fermented for 24 hours (to minimize the amount of lactose ingested). Two-three cups a day of kefir (with a few berries in it, maybe with some pine and walnut nuts, also maybe with some raw, unfiltered and local honey too), and CDiff should be back in check within 3-4 days. No need for antibiotics, for pill probiotics, or doctors for that matter.

As a filmmaker and a graphics artist these days, I like Blender and its idea behind it, I really do. This is a copy of what I wrote on my blog about all that: The CGI on this movie still looks like VFX animation and not realistic. It looks fake. Camera tracking is good, modelling seems ok, but lighting and animation aren’t. There are no shadows to talk about, everything it’s too HDR-ish. If that’s what Blender can do in 2012, then color me unimpressed. That’s no Hollywood-worthy CGI. And let’s not forget that this movie was produced by the Blender guys themselves, with hand-picked Blender artists.

Unfortunately, that quality is not even good enough for TV anymore. Sure, there have been worse VFX on TV than what Blender can do, for example the re-imagined version of “V”, but thing is, there have been better ones too. Back in 2010, Stargate:Universe had some amazing VFX in some episodes, more realistic than anything I’ve seen on TV, before or after. An even more important point for TV is the time it takes to do things with the app (since their deadlines are extremely strict). Blender is not that easy to use, Maya can do better, faster.

That doesn't mean that Blender is useless. It’s not. You can’t beat its price and features in the advertising sector (which doesn't require extreme realism, it mostly needs some animation tricks), schools (for obvious reasons), or as a hobbyist artist. Blender can also prove to be a life-saver for indie filmmakers who primarily have the time to deal with Blender (rather than the money to buy other packages). So if *I* was doing an indie short movie, I would use Blender, because it's good-enough for what I would need to do, and I have indefinite time on my hands. So it’s got its uses in the world. It’s just that I don’t see it being able to compete for Hollywood movies and serious TV shows.

Actually, SGU at $2.5mil was cheap. Maybe not as cheap as SyFy wanted it to be, but it's cheaper than the average US show, which costs $3mil per episode these days. And that's the average price. Some network shows go up to $4 mil per episode. Cable shows are usually cheaper. "Mad Men" costs $2.5mil per episode too btw (started at $2.3mil in 2008 according to NYTimes).

The Canadian-made SGU had movie-grade FX on a TV budget (it cost $2.5mil per episode according to Robert Carlyle, the main actor on the show). SGU's FX were the best ever on TV (so far). Just check on Netflix "The Greater Good" episode to see the amount of detail and craftsmanship that went on the FX. But I think Lucas' problem is that he wants to do the FX via ILM, which is an expensive company to work with, even if he owns it. The answer is to go off shore for FX. Either Canada, or even South America.

Fully agreed. All the elderly family I have in Greece have feature phones, but they learn by habit: press some numbers, press the green button, then the red. Nothing else. They don't even know how to program their TV, someone else has to set it up for them the first time, and then they remember by habit that button with a 3 on it, is "News channel", for example. They don't want to learn how things really work. I tried. I tried with my mom, I tried to explain her the logic, but she prefers to write down on a paper which button does what, and then press these blindly, without understanding what's really going on.

So the problem really is "I don't want to learn", not that iOS is too difficult to use. Especially iOS, is not.

dkd903 writes: Something very interesting and potentially controversial is going on in the GNOME project. In an email to the GNOME mailing list, Jon McCann said that GNOME should focus on supporting on only support for Linux and drop the support for the other operating systems such as BSD, Solaris and Unix.Link to Original Source

Epirus in Greece, where I'm coming from, is a quake zone btw, we have "feel-able" earthquakes regularly there (at least once or twice a year). The biggest ones, where people died, were in 2004, and then back in 1981.

In my mother country, Greece, we have a word for this: koufovrasi. Supposedly (or so the superstition goes), a few hours before an earthquake, the weather becomes hot, stale, like you're choking, and it's like the sound doesn't travel as much (that's why it's called as such, which in free translation it means "deaf, boiled weather"). In the villages of the mountain Epirus, this is a known "sign" that an earthquake might hit soon. I personally experienced this kind of weather once or twice during in my early life there, but I don't remember if an earthquake ever hit soon afterward or not.

Eugenia Loli writes: "The biggest political party in Portugal, the Socialist Party, will present a new proposal for approval in the next government, no matter if they win the elections or not. They support a vision where Creative Commons harm culture, and in this law proposal they intend to turn it illegal. Personally, as a Creative Commons artist (my videography), I find this to be a very disturbing event, and I surely hope such prohibiting and artistic anti-freedom laws don't spread in other European countries too."Link to Original Source